I’ve run a production company for over 10 years. Last year I got so frustrated with how my creative video references were managed that I built our own tool. Want to give it a try?

I started a video production company called Perspective Pictures at 21 years old 10 years ago. We’ve now managed to grow that to a 30 person production company, with offices in London and Dubai. I’m 31 now, and honestly it’s been the absolute ride of a lifetime. 

We went through a specific period a few years ago where I genuinely wasn’t happy with the rate at which we were innovating or improving our creative output. We had a lot of conversations on this internally and a group of us started sharing references with each other constantly. 

Very quickly we found managing these references basically impossible, some would land via instagram DM at 2am, some would be posted by the teams in slack channels, shared in internal meetings, and links dropped in notion boards. Then there is extracting GIFs from them for mood boards in decks, which wastes sooo much time. 

About 18 months ago I started seriously looking at what was on the market. Frame.io is great for review and approval but it's not built for references. We tried building something in Notion, but there was just too much friction for the team to save stuff consistently. 

So I started building a solution. I had never written a line of code in my life. I learned with Claude, found a technical co-founder who actually knows what they’re doing, and hired a few devs. We've spent the last year building it out, and it’s been absolutely transformative to how we handle references. 

It's called Spark. The basic idea: save any video on the web in two clicks (we have a Chrome extension),  share via Instagram DM, drop in a dedicated slack channel, upload the video from your desktop, or just drop the link in the app. Spark will then uses AI to tag it, transcribe it. Then you can share with your team, build collections and even export GIFs. 

Think of it as being able to build your very own internal Netflix with creative references from anywhere on the internet. 

A few honest things:

• It's not 100% finished, so some of the polish isn't there yet.
• It's free to try. 12 videos, no credit card, no expiry on the trial. 
• It's built by people who actually use it. Our team at Perspective have been it for months. Their feedback shaped so much of what's good about it.

If you run a production team/agency, or you're a director who hoards references like I do, I'd genuinely love you to try it and tell me what's you think.

Link in comments because I think Reddit prefers it that way.